Contemporary technology offers many instances that require rapidly identifying the constituents of a chemical mixture. The chemical mixture can be a solid, a liquid or a gas. In the semiconductor industry numerous multilayered structures are made, for example on semiconductor chips or semiconductor chip packaging substrates. In order to monitor the quality of the products being fabricated, it may be necessary to determine the profile of various chemical species in the multilayer structure. This can be done by ablating away the material from the surface and analyzing the material that is ablated away. For such a process to have practical value, it is imperative that the ablating or etching away of the material be done rapidly and that the analysis of the etched or ablated material be performed rapidly.
In the case of a chemical fabrication process for a liquid, it may be desirable to monitor continually the constituent components of the liquid formed by the process. For such monitoring to have value in practical use, it is imperative that the analysis of the liquid be done rapidly so that, as the liquid flows past the monitoring point, an analysis can be done at a closely spaced sequence of times.
As another example, in order to comply with increasingly stringent environmental standards it may be necessary to reduce pollutants emitted into the atmosphere by smokestacks of a manufacturing facility. To do this it may be necessary to monitor continually the chemical constituents of the gases emitted by a smokestack. To do this efficiently it may be necessary to determine these constituents at closely spaced times.
As another example, it may be desirable to construct apparatus that can be controlled so that it runs at peak efficiency, an illustrative example being a gasoline engine. To maximize the efficiency of such an engine, and minimize the pollutants in its exhaust emissions, it may become imperative to monitor continually the chemical constituents in the exhaust from the engine, and the chemical constituents of the fuel entering the engine, so that a feedback control mechanism from the exhaust monitoring can achieve the stated goals. Such an engine would require continually monitoring, at closely spaced intervals of time, the chemical constituents of the exhaust and of the fuel input.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,866,899 to Busignies et al. describes an electronic spectroanalysis computer. The apparatus quantitatively analyzes an infrared absorption spectrum of a multicomponent sample to provide a quantitative deconvolution, i.e., a decomposition of the complex spectrum in terms of the constituents' spectra. The technique involves integrations; these integrations are time-consuming and therefore inefficient.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system, method, and apparatus for providing profiles of the quantity or relative concentration of chemical constituents of a composite sample, and for doing this with minimal computation time.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system, method, and apparatus for determining said quantities or concentrations, and providing profiles of them, when the values A.sub.ij admit multiple possibilities.